[Video] Stories Of These 3 Young Men Highlight Why Violence Against Boys Is Underreported

मर्द को दर्द नहीं होता – Be a Man! is Agenda 1’s latest video. Information and our understanding on forms of abuse, including systematic statistics on sexual violence against boys, are woefully lacking. This video features the voices of three young men from Delhi, on a shared experience of violence, mostly suffered in silence.

Last week in Vijay Nagar in Delhi, two boys both minors aged 16 and 17 years, sodomized a 12 year old boy for refusing to buy them a bidi (cigarette). Both the accused have been arrested.

One of the few recent pan India surveys on child abuse, “Study on Child Abuse India 2007”, a Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) study showed that every second child in the country is facing one or more forms of sexual abuse. The survey also found that the vast majority of victims (72 percent) said that they did not report the matter to anyone and only 3 percent of them or their families told the police. In most cases the child knew the perpetrator. More than 50% of the children who admitted to being physically abused were boys. Limited data show that, in some countries, boys are even less likely than girls to seek help. And, like girls, most boys remain silent about their experience of violence, regardless of the type, because they do not view it as a problem.

Sources: “Study on Child Abuse India 2007”, a Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD); “United Nations Children’s Fund, Hidden in Plain Sight: A statistical analysis of violence against children“, UNICEF, New York, 2014; “2 teenagers held for sodomising minor boy”, The Asian Age, 8th January 2015.

Video by Agenda 1, which is a pilot research and media project to understand the root causes and drivers that normalize issues of abuse and violence against children and adolescents.

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